Connexin

My name is Emily Halsey and I'm the engineering operations manager here at Connexin. We connect people, places and things—and we're on a mission to become one of the biggest alt nets in the north of the UK. My role at Connexin is to look after the engineering teams and the operations of that team, ensuring that the ambitious targets that we've set ourselves as a company are met and achieved.

In 2020, we secured an £80 million pound investment from our investors at PortSea. To build a 10 gigabit capable network in Hull, we knew we needed to invest and build systems that could grow alongside us as a company: Skedulo was scalable, and agile, which is exactly what we were looking for. So when we received our investment, it was well documented that we needed to scale up the company and team in order to deliver what we promised we would deliver.

We couldn't scale with our incumbent systems, which is when we approached many different companies and found that Skedulo was the one for us.

Before using Skedulo, we were on a mission to build the bridge between the office and the field teams, and ensure that operationally we were being as efficient as possible. Managing manual scheduling processes for our engineers meant that we couldn't offer the best customer experience. That's something that we are very precious about as a company. Making the move to Skedulo meant we could bridge that gap between the office and the field teams.

Before working with Skedulo, we used manual and Field Service Salesforce scheduling procedures, which did not fit with our growth as a company—we moved from a very stressful and unreliable manual system. Being able to have our own bespoke software that is made for our company's needs has been a massive help for us operationally.

Our systems in place for our engineering function weren't suitable for the scale and the growth that we were experiencing. The system we used couldn't perform handover notes as we can on Skedulo, and we couldn’t leave any pictures with the jobs. Previously, when that job was complete, we had to wait for the engineer to come back to the office and inform us of what had actually happened on that site—whereas we can see it in real-time on Skedulo and act accordingly.

Personally, I have worked on both systems and was a huge part of the transition. The old system was impractical, we couldn't go home at night and be comfortable and confident with our jobs for the next day. It was a constant checking process: making sure everything was as it should be, and whether jobs were dispatched properly. Whereas with Skedulo, it’s automated—we can rest easy knowing that.

Skedulo was very easy to work with—they took all of our requirements onboard before granting us the proposal, and we had regular weekly call updates with the software team and the project managers.

Skedulo gave us a sandbox version, so we could test it before we agreed on go-live. They gave us fake profiles for the engineers to log into, it was very much a partnership rather than just applying the software. Skedulo stuck out among the other competitors that we were looking into because it was that partnership rather than just a supplier.

Skedulo has enabled our software teams to be able to build upon that software using API integration. This means that our customers can book their own jobs and have that customer experience that we are looking for. The Skedulo mobile application enables the office and the field teams to be connected on a day-to-day basis at key points throughout the day.

My favourite feature of the Skedulo app is being able to see the different progress stages of each engineering job, whether that be on-site, in progress, sign-off, or complete. It just really helps us plan as a department for the rest of the day if they're ahead of themselves or the rest of the week.

We can now offer a greater customer experience, as well as a greater work experience for our scheduling teams and our engineering teams.

As a company, Skedulo has benefited our customers because our software team can integrate via API so that the customers can book their own jobs around their availability. They don't have to call, they don't have to email—they can do it online in one function. Skedulo is something that we have really easily automated into our own bespoke CRM, which again is a massive factor in the customer experience.

Without Skedulo, we would not be able to maintain the high levels of customer care that we are enforcing, and we would not meet the targets that we have set ourselves as a business and with our investors.

With the scale of the team now, we would not be able to complete half of the jobs that we do when we promised to the investors that we are going to complete.

We would spend hours collating all of the different information that we need from the engineers when they're finished on their sites. We would still be using outdated software—it would not be manageable with the scale of the team now.

So we're currently in the middle of our next integration with Skedulo for a mobile forms piece which will enable all of our engineering forms, and paperwork sign-offs from customers to be stored and available on a mobile app.

The forms project will enable our engineers to do all of their handovers, risk assessments, and anything that was done in an external software within the Skedulo app—so it's kind of a one-stop-shop for us.

In the last year, we've doubled our workforce, and we are on the road to do that again for this year. We couldn't have done that without Skedulo as a utilisation tool for us, and having that in the pipeline has been amazing. We are massively looking forward to our future and our growth. And we're really excited to have that partnership with Skedulo and see what else they can help us with.